A concise presentation of Python¶

These notes address students that have already taken a course in programming and need to become familiar with Python. We hope they will be useful for students that will take courses that use Python to teach algorithms, data structures and libraries for dealing with tabular data and for linear algebra.

The notes do not include many explanations but use instead a lot of examples. For further details, explanations and examples it includes references to the Python documentation and to An introduction to programming in Python, an introductory book by Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne, and Robert Dondero from Princeton University.

The notes are designed for the student to work in parallell reading them and testing and tweaking the code. Code fragments can be copied and used in a Jupyter notebook or any other environment for running Python. Also, all notebooks can be downloaded by clicking on the download icon up to the right in the middle section: if it suggests to download as a .ipynb it is a jupyter notebook!

The book uses Python 3 and we make no comparisons with Python 2.